Certainty Quotes - Page 40

• The kind of hope that I often think about…I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us, or we don’t. It is a dimension of the soul It’s not essentially dependent upon some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

  Vaclav Havel

  Thinking, Soul, Mind

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• The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is highest in the world, will last as long as...the frog?

  Joseph Heller

  Fighting, Men, Years

  Joseph Heller (2010). “Catch-22: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.318, Simon and Schuster

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• He stared at her, knowing with certainty that he was falling in love. He pulled her close and kissed her beneath a blanket of stars, wondering how on earth he'd been lucky enough to find her.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Love, Stars, Fall

  FaceBook post by Nicholas Sparks from May 27, 2012

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• There are stories, like maps that agree... too consistent among too many languages and histories to be only wishful thinking.... It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Spiritual, Thinking, Remembers Everything

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “Against the Day”, p.193, Penguin

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• All writers - all beings - are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force...All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.

  Janet Frame

  Writing, Journey, Land

  Janet Frame (2001). “An Angel at My Table: The Complete Autobiography”, Womens PressLtd

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• There is a painful difference between the expectation of an unpleasant event and its final certainty.

  Emma Thompson

  Differences, Expectations, Finals

  Emma Thompson (2007). “Sense and Sensibility: The Screenplay & Diaries”, Newmarket Press

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• We must realize that the Reformation world view leads in the direction of government freedom. But the humanist world view with inevitable certainty leads in the direction of statism. This is so because humanists, having no god, must put something at the center, and it is inevitably society, government, or the state.

  Francis Schaeffer

  Government, Views, World

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• Everything good is costly, and the development of the personality is one of the most costly of all things. It will cost you your innocence, your illusions, your certainty. (10)

  Sheldon B. Kopp

  Personality, Cost, Development

  SHELDON B KOPP (1972). “IF YOU MEET THE BUDDHA ON THE ROAD KILL HIM THE PILGRIMAGE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY PATIENTS”

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• Were we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the question, "What comes into your mind when you think about God?" we might predict with certainty the future of that man.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Men, Thinking, Mind

  Aiden Wilson Tozer (1965). “The Knowledge of the Holy”, p.4, Fig

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• People who ask confidently get more than those who are hesitant and uncertain. When you've figured out what you want to ask for, do it with certainty, boldness and confidence.

  Jack Canfield

  Motivational, Positive, Confidence

  FaceBook post by Jack Canfield from Mar 06, 2012

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• This is what it is to be human: to see the essential existential futility of all action, all striving -- and to act, to strive. This is what it is to be human: to reach forever beyond your grasp. This is what it is to be human: to live forever or die trying. This is what it is to be human: to perpetually ask the unanswerable questions, in the hope that the asking of them will somehow hasten the day when they will be answered. This is what it is to be human: to strive in the face of the certainty of failure. This is what it is to be human: to persist.

  Spider Robinson

  Forever, Trying, Essentials

  Spider Robinson (1997). “The Star Dancers”

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• So we stand there, part of a crowd a thousand people strong, beaming up at the sky with wonder. I knew with a sudden certainty that wherever I am in the future - up in my treehouse, alone in the school cafeteria, or trying to figure out what my teachers are talking about, a part of me will always be right here, right now, wish that giant eye in the sky shining down on me, telling me it's going to be alright.

  Wendy Mass

  Teacher, Strong, School

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• He recognized with absolute certainty the empty fragility of even the noblest theorizings as compared with the definitive plenitude of the smallest fact grasped in its total, concrete reality.

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

  Reality, Fragility, Facts

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• It is part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means - be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of things, the meaning of our own lives or the absence of meaning.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Mean, Certainty Of Death, Void

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• She loved Bram in a clear-eyed way she’d never loved her ex-husband, no rose-colored glasses or mindless giddiness, no Cinderella fantasies or false certainty that he’d put her life in order. What she felt for Bram was messy, honest, and soul-deep. He felt like…part of her, the best and the worst. Like someone she wanted to struggle through life with; share triumphs and catastrophes; share holidays, birthdays, every days

  Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  Husband, Struggle, Holiday

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• Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Atheist, Writing, Hands

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• True. The one certainty about riding, Braygan, is that - at some time - you will fall off. It is a fact. Another fact you might like to consider, in your life of perpetual terror, is that you will die. We are all going to die, some of us young, some of us old, some of us in our sleep, some of us screaming in agony. We cannot stop it, we can only delay it.

  David Gemmell

  Fall, Sleep, Agony

  David Gemmell (2003). “White Wolf: A Novel of Druss the Legend”, Random House Digital, Inc.

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• I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  My Own

  Ludwig Wittgenstein (1969). “On Certainty”

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• Here is the point about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true - that religion has caused innumerate people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Believe, Awards, Eyebrows

  "God Is Not Great" by Christopher Hitchens, www.slate.com. April 25, 2007.

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• My mother has made choices in her life, as we all must, and she is at peace with them. I can see her peace. She did not cop out on herself. The benefits of her choices are massive-a long, stable marriage to a man she still calls her best friend; a family that has extended now into grandchildren who adore her; a certainty in her own strength. Maybe some things were sacrificed, and my dad made his sacrifices, too-but who amongst us lives without sacrifice?

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Mother, Dad, Sacrifice

  "Eat, Pray, Love". Book by Elizabeth Gilbert, 2007.

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• Finnick!" Something between a shriek and a cry of joy. A lovely if somewhat bedraggled young woman--dark tangled hair, sea green eyes--runs toward us in nothing but a sheet. "Finnick!" And suddenly, it's as if there's no one in the world but these two, crashing through space to reach each other. They collide, enfold, lose their balance, and slam against a wall, where they stay. Clinging into one being. Indivisible. A pang of jealousy hits me. Not for either Finnick or Annie but for their certainty. No one seeing them could doubt their love.

  Suzanne Collins

  Running, Wall, Eye

  Suzanne Collins (2010). “Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, Book 3)”, p.175, Scholastic Inc.

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• The certainty that she would find what it was she sought just slipped away, until one night she knew there was nothing, no one waiting for her. That no matter how far she walked, how carefully she searched, how much she wanted to find the person she was looking for, she was alone" - The Forgotten Garden

  Kate Morton

  Night, Garden, Waiting

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• If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.

  Terry Eagleton

  Degrees, Needs, Stuff

  Terry Eagleton (2007). “The Meaning of Life”, p.62, Oxford University Press

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• Maybe that's what is means to be human . . . forever questioning our certainties.

  Kay Hooper

  Mean, Forever, Questioning

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• Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.

  H. L. Mencken

  Inspirational, Men, Progress

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.416, Knopf

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